Beewyze, the Digital Solidarity Hat

Beewyze is a startup under development since October 2024, whose objective is to promote solidarity between artists and social causes, NGOs or associations. It takes the form of a "digital hat", with an equitable distribution of donations between artists and beneficiary organizations, while involving companies that can amplify donations. The main challenge is the rapid production of a truly usable and used MVP (Minimum Viable Product), allowing the onboarding of artists, event management, and activation of donation amplification by companies.

I work in direct interaction with the CEO, an experienced technical investor, a frontend developer, and more occasionally with other team members.

Task & Objective

My role in this project is multiple, as a tech lead (the CTO title being still premature at this stage). My responsibilities include: maintaining the codebase, managing deployments, adding new features (discussion, design, backend implementation, database, and AWS deployment), as well as structuring the project technically.

The main objectives of the MVP are as follows:

  • Manage financial flows via Stripe, with integration of KYC/KYB procedures (Know Your Customer / Know Your Business).
  • Register donations and events on the blockchain, and allow the burn (destruction) of donation tokens by companies.
  • Provide administrators with tools for monitoring events and donations.
  • Automate the sending of emails, invoices, and generate donation proofs for fiscal use.
  • Manage infrastructure via AWS.

The success of the MVP is measured by the onboarding of 100 artists, event organization, and the implementation of a first company amplification, in order to create a first "success story".

Action & Development

My work covered several technical and organizational aspects:

  • Scalability and maintenance of AWS infrastructure: improvement of Dockerfiles to resolve pnpm version conflicts within the monorepo.
  • Resolution of backend and database tickets, with regular application maintenance.
  • Reorganization of the monorepo: clearer structure with packages such as commons (shared types) and safe (related to cryptography and web3), with the objective of reducing technical debt.
  • Addition of fixtures to prepare automatic tests.
  • Development of the donation amplification functionality by companies.
  • Technical participation in weekly meetings and coordination of the development team.

When I arrived, the situation was complex: Stripe had temporarily blocked its API due to suspicion of illicit financing (related to certain NGOs), which put user registrations on hold. The existing code was poorly maintained and the initial author had left the project, making it difficult to take over. I had to explore the codebase without reliable tests for several months, while correcting various problems related to AWS, data, or business specificities.

I actively collaborated with Stripe support (particularly for KYC-related questions), as well as with other development team members. The major challenges were:

  • Learning blockchain technologies (indexing, hash system, burn/mint of tokens, definition of ABI – Application Binary Interfaces).
  • Discovering AWS infrastructure, with management via Terraform.
  • Taking control of legacy code, often more complex to maintain than new code.

Decision-making was based on a clear separation of responsibilities, constant communication with the team, refactoring, and logical structuring of the monorepo.

Result

The platform is now in production. Several events have been successfully organized, generating dozens of donations for artists and NGOs. The results are visible through events relayed on social networks, recordings in the database and on the blockchain.

We have not yet set up formal metric tracking via tools like Grafana or Prometheus, but the qualitative results are encouraging.

A major lesson: the web3 layer currently brings more complexity than direct value. However, it plays a strategic role for the project's storytelling and company engagement in the amplification mechanism.

Technical Stack

The project relies on the following tools and technologies:

  • Language: TypeScript
  • Backend: Express / Hono
  • Smart Contracts: Solidity
  • Indexer: Squid
  • Database: SQL
  • GraphQL Gateway: Hasura
  • Frontend: Remix
  • Infrastructure: AWS (Amazon Web Services) with management via Terraform
  • CI/CD: GitHub Actions

It is important to note that this technical stack is inherited: I did not participate in the initial choices. The major technical challenges encountered include:

  • An initial Stripe blockage preventing any user creation due to the KYC verification process.
  • Discovering AWS and Terraform, with incidents related to resources or random deployments.
  • Difficulties related to Web3, particularly in defining the ABI necessary for interaction with blockchain smart contracts.